Wednesday, 12 September 2012

Americanisation of anything sounds deadly to some of us.
Jack Zipes is an American, but he is also a world authority on fairy tales, and
as a hero of modern folklorists he might also be a little bit conservative
(small c). I’m not sure about that, but I’m not about to consult Google on the
matter either. Suffice to say this was one impression I got from his talk at
the Warburg Institute in London this week.

He told us an interesting story in itself – that of the
Grimm’s fairy tales and the changes they have undergone at the hands of
translators and adaptors in British and American culture throughout the
twentieth century.

The part that made me prick up my ears like a good fairytale
fox was the very first stage in the life of these märchen, or little tales, as the
Grimms called them. They intended to preserve all kinds of folk tales from
around Germany, seeing them as ancient relics under threat from progress even
in the early nineteenth century. However, the versions they presented to the
world were translations or adaptations themselves. Often they worked from texts
sent to them in Germanic dialects, translating them into High German and making
changes according to advice from other collectors, or indeed simply to satisfy
their own desire to create perfect folktales that would also be suited to the
tastes of an intellectual, adult readership.

This in itself sounds like a serious undertaking. Only two
of the stories they collected were presented in their published collection in
dialect form, and even these tidied up to make them into better folktales.
What, then, are we to make of the cultural appropriation of these tales by Britain,
and then North America, as they adapted, combined, edited and reinvented to fit
their own value systems?

The least offensive story to be told is just that the
retellings in English of Grimm’s tales in the form of children’s versions,
illustrated books, then graphic novels, plays, and films were simply further
steps on a path already laid down for all folk tales. There is a reason these
tales stick in our culture and in us: they contain universals, they speak to
all humanity, and humanity will retell them in whatever form suits it at the
time.

The more sinister version is one of cultural appropriation,
of an attitude that does not attempt to preserve the universals in these
stories despite the globalised world we live in.

But whilst fairytale mash-ups in films such as the Shrek
series might move us away from any detectable message in the originals, folk
tales have always been there for the taking when it comes to interpretation. Give
the same skeleton story to ten people in a room and they will all come up with
a different meaning, or moral, and that is true for ten people with a shared
cultural background.

Zipes worried that the sanitisation, the sweetening, of
these tales for modern American children removes the possibility of dealing
with ideas of child abuse, violence, and other dark themes of life that appear
to be there in the originals as a helpful way to address the facts of human
existence. But those themes are only there if we go looking for them in the
first place. For every reader who finds Hansel and Gretel helpful for dealing
with feelings of abandonment or threat, there will be another who delights in
the curiosity and hubris of the children, and another whose sense of slapstick
is tickled by a mean old crone tumbling into an oven (depending on which
version you get).

Indeed, the evidence of Americanisation that he showed us in
the form of animated films such as BettyBoop as Snow White andRed Hot RidingHood by Tex Avery only served to illustrate that, whilst such tales can be
used to send out any message we want, it is the audience who make up their own
minds. Every mind is different, including those of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm;
where these tales in all their forms take us will be down to our own
experiences.

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About Me

I am a writer, mainly of short stories, and those often with a folkloric bent. Some of these I write as part of my PhD in Creative Writing, at the University of Chichester. I am associate editor at The Word Factory, where I co-run a short story club, and I also run my own critique group for short story writers in London. Before all of that, I studied Philosophy for a long time, with an emphasis on philosophy of mind and rationality. I live in London and have a 'real' job as well as writing, but happily I reside by a little patch of woods which is all I need to keep me sane.